


The Right Kind of Technical Hitch

by notaverse



Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Crack, Cyborgs, M/M, uke!Jin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-01
Updated: 2011-10-01
Packaged: 2017-10-24 05:47:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/259673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notaverse/pseuds/notaverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kame's been acting strangely, and turning blue on national television is the last straw. AT-TUN try to figure out what's causing him to malfunction, but only Jin succeeds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Right Kind of Technical Hitch

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** The Right Kind of Technical Hitch  
>  **Fandom:** KAT-TUN  
>  **Pairing:** Kame x Jin  
>  **Rating:** Shall we say R to be safe?  
>  **Genre:** AU cracky comedy fluff?  
>  **Disclaimer:** Not mine, damnit.

Following yet another disastrous interview, an emergency meeting of AT-TUN had been called at Jin's place. Kame wasn't allowed to know about it, which meant that nobody could tell Jin either - at least, not until they showed up at his apartment. Koki brought food, Nakamaru brought drink, and Junno brought Ueda.

Ten minutes later, they were all sprawled on the floor in various states of disarray, crumbs everywhere, though the additional mess was hardly noticeable. There were papers littered all about the room, many with Jin's untidy English scrawled all over them, and an odd number of books on electronics.

Ueda tapped lightly on his drink to call the meeting to order and Jin sat up straight, hoping somebody would finally clue him in as to why they'd shown up out of the blue for an impromptu party that didn't seem to include their sixth member.

"We have to do something about Kame," Ueda declared, and there was a resounding chorus of agreement from Koki, Junno and Nakamaru.

"Oh!" Jin thought he'd figured it out. "We're going to have a surprise party for him! That's why we're having this secret planning session!"

Nakamaru looked like he was about to say something cutting, then shook his head wearily and passed Jin another beer. "No, we're having this session because Kame's not working."

Jin snorted. "Hah! This is Kame we're talking about. He's *always* working, hadn't you noticed?"

Koki grinned. "He means Kame's malfunctioning."

"Like my GBA after you accidentally knocked it out the window," Junno added helpfully.

Jin didn't remember having knocked Kame out the window. "I know he's been acting a little strange lately, but..."

"A little strange?" Ueda repeated. "He's on his way to breaking down completely! Look what happened to the skin pigmentation settings this afternoon. We're going to have to switch them off for good!"

"But then Kame will look horribly pale and sickly all the time," Jin protested.

"Better than him turning blue on national television!" Nakamaru argued. "If Koki hadn't quickly covered it up by improvising a new Oxy advert and pretending to wipe him off while I secretly worked the remote, we'd all be on permanent hiatus!"

"And the studio audience loved it, of course." Koki helped himself to another cracker. "They were so busy watching me rub my hands all over Kame's face they didn't notice his fingers turned back to normal all by themselves."

"It still shouldn't have happened in the first place." Ueda did *not* look happy, and he was staring suspiciously at Jin. "You didn't sit on the remote again by mistake, did you?"

"Hey!" Jin hit him with a cushion. "I learned my lesson after the first time."

"Third time," Junno corrected absently.

"Third time. Whatever. I haven't been near the remote, I swear!"

"He's telling the truth," Nakamaru said. "It hasn't been out of my sight for months, not since long before Kame started malfunctioning. I can't find the manual, though."

When Jin blushed pillar-box red and started studying the floor with unprecedented interest, the whereabouts of the missing book became apparent. The handfuls of pages scattered round the room were, in fact, from Kame's operating manual.

"You've been reading the manual?" Koki asked. "Is there anything in the troubleshooting section?"

Jin frowned. "I don't know." He pointed to the oversized kanji dictionary lying atop the largest pile of papers. "I had to keep looking things up, and then Pi called and I got distracted, and-"

Ueda held up a hand to forestall him. "We get the picture. Anybody know when the warranty runs out?"

That, Jin could help with. He rummaged around in a box of receipts, concert tickets and miscellaneous junk until he produced a worn scrap of paper. He peered closely at it, struggling to make out the faded words. When he did manage to read it, the news wasn't good.

"Kame's warranty expired in 2006," he announced. "We can't claim free tech support anymore and we can't have any parts replaced."

Everyone scowled at this. It had been absolutely essential, several years back, to have Kame's artificial hair grower replaced. Its products, especially the eyebrows, had been terrible to behold, and had it not been for the (horribly expensive but so worth it) boyish cuteness factor, KAT-TUN might never have come into existence.

When the group was first formed, Johnny had called them together (all but Kame) to reveal the best-kept secret in the Japanese music industry.

 _Kamenashi Kazuya, the 'K' in 'KAT-TUN', was a cyborg._

Exactly why the company owned a singing, dancing, acting, pole-dancing cyborg had never been explained to them, though everyone had their pet theories and none of them were flattering. They'd inherited the incredibly expensive artificial boy, along with all his paperwork, and been told that on no account must they ever let him find out. He was their responsibility now, and like it or not, they were going to be working together.

Not letting Kame find out had actually been quite easy. He was amazingly lifelike, being a mixture of organics, synthetics and electronics, and his body mimicked the functions of a living human to such an extent that it was easy to forget his origins when they were out eating a meal together, or playing around in a pool on a hot day. Most of the time, they didn't even have to think about it, though there were occasions when he required maintenance - he saw a special "doctor" and never knew why - and sometimes his parts needed replacing.

The Kamenashi family, Johnny had explained, had been specially selected to raise and observe the boy, who grew as any normal adolescent. They'd been paid a great deal to create a loving home for him, and they'd done an excellent job of keeping him as natural and likable as possible.

Until now.

For the last few weeks, Kame's behaviour had been increasingly erratic, though he never showed any signs of noticing it himself. Nobody knew what to do about him.

"I suppose we could get a replacement," Ueda said at last. "He's worth enough now that they'd have to pay out to buy a new model."

"Buy a new one!" Jin exclaimed. "But...it wouldn't be Kame! We can't replace him!"

"I didn't say we *should* do it, only that we *could*," Ueda said. "Strictly a last resort, though."

"But if he starts licking chairs again I'm not sure how much longer we can explain it away as 'fanservice'," Nakamaru said. "They'll start to think he has a fetish."

"His lungs don't always work either," Junno added. "Somebody's bound to notice eventually, especially when winter comes and no one can see him breathe."

"And trying to keep the girls away from him is impossible," Koki complained. "Sure, a lot of him's organic and the manual says he's fully functional, but if he turns orange or something when he's with a girl I think she's going to notice her boyfriend's not human."

Ueda groaned. "Why does the manual say that, of all things? What did they have him commissioned for anyway?"

Jin, who'd read that particular chapter many times over with a sort of helpless curiosity, wasn't at all surprised to hear that Kame was capable of sex. The universe would've been ridiculously unfair if he wasn't, Jin thought. If you're going to build an expensive, talented, enormously pretty cyborg, you should at least make it as lifelike as possible.

But perhaps it would've been easier for Jin if Kame hadn't seemed so...human. If his skin had been cold metal instead of warm, synthetic flesh, if his laughter had been harsh and mechanical instead of exuberant and full of life, Jin would never have been attracted to him in the first place.

Because no matter how lifelike Kame was, no matter how much information his neural network had processed over the years, he was still an artificial human. His behaviour had been built up gradually by his complicated electronic brain, and experience had taught him how to produce almost any emotion you cared to name.

 _Almost._

Could Kame feel love? Jin knew he wasn't going to find the answer in the manual, even if he looked up every single word.

He busied himself retrieving the pages and stacking them in something approaching the correct order, handing them round to the rest of the band in the hopes that between them they could find something that would explain how to fix Kame. Sounds of slurping, crunching and discouraged muttering came from the floor - mostly from Nakamaru, who was absolutely starved - until Jin's phone began to buzz and dance across the table.

"That was a text message," he said, totally unnecessarily. "From Kame. He's coming over. Right now."

There was a frantic scramble to hide the manual, the electronics textbooks (Nakamaru: he's bound to get suspicious if he sees *you* with those!) and the remainder of the food, because ever since they'd had to adjust Kame's food intake module to stop him becoming anorexic, he'd been quite happy to snack on anything in sight.

"We'll hide in the bedroom," Ueda said as he ushered the others through the door. "Get rid of him as soon as you can - say you've got a headache or something - and we'll be here to back you up if he starts acting weird again."

"Yeah, we'll rescue you if Kame's hair grower goes haywire again and he tries to strangle you with the results," Koki said cheerfully.

Jin huffed and hid a few manual pages in with his magazine stack, hoping Kame wouldn't decide to pick up some light reading while he was over. He'd have to get rid of him as soon as possible - Kame wasn't stupid, though Jin was inclined to believe that more had been spent on his looks than his brains, and he was bound to notice the presence of four extra people in Jin's apartment.

Particularly since they'd just switched his stereo on.

"You have to go," he said as he stormed into his bedroom. "Kame will know you're here and he'll wonder why we all got together without him! If you're hiding, why's the music on?"

T-TUN were staring blankly at the stereo, which was blaring away happily without a care in the world.

"We didn't touch it," Ueda said slowly. "It just switched itself on."

"I don't care which one of you did it, just get out."

"It's true," Junno said. "None of us touched it. We were all sitting on the bed, and the music started playing."

Jin switched it off and gestured to the door. "Out. Now. If Kame goes weird I'll handle him."

Nakamaru looked at him warily. "Handle him? I saw those pages you'd scribbled on, Akanishi, and-"

"And you can tell me what you think you read later," Jin interrupted. "Just because I've been through the manual a lot doesn't mean...ah."

"Ah?" the others chorused.

Jin scratched his head. "There was something in the troubleshooting section about accidental broadcasts. I didn't follow it that well but the signals in Kame's head can get sent outside his body by mistake. The range is short - about as far as his remote - but there was a warning that he might affect electronic devices."

The others immediately backed away from all appliances and headed for the front door. "Take the remote," Nakamaru said, handing it to Jin on his way out. "If he acts up, put him on standby and call us."

Standby, indeed. Jin was determined to find out what was wrong with Kame so they could lock the stupid remote away forever and not have to worry about Kame suddenly developing green stripes on his face or something.

He didn't have green stripes, blue polka-dots or anything else obviously wrong with him when he showed up on Jin's doorstep five minutes later. Not at first glance, anyway. He sat down on the couch, refused the offer of a drink, and toyed with his watch until Jin sat down next to him and tried to catch his eye.

Jin was trying to decide what to say to open the conversation when Kame blurted out, "I think there's something wrong with me!"

"Uh..." Since Jin was expressly forbidden to tell Kame his origins, he couldn't all very well tell his friend he was malfunctioning, could he?

"Like this afternoon," Kame continued. "I was in the middle of a sentence and Koki suddenly started grabbing my face and making jokes about cleanser, and all of you looked absolutely horrified. And on Tuesday, when I was late for the photoshoot, it was because I had to cut my nails. They were *this* long, Jin!" Kame held his hands about six inches apart. "That's not normal!"

"There are some people who grow their nails that long," Jin said weakly.

Kame shot him dead with a look. "Not in five minutes, they don't. And when I got out of the shower this morning I could've sworn I had purple zigzags tattooed down my arms, but they'd gone by the time I got dressed. So...either we've all gone out drinking too much this week and I'm seeing things, or there's actually something wrong with me."

It wasn't often that Jin saw Kame so distressed and unsure of himself. When it came to all matters work-related, he was a smooth professional; in his personal life he was no less confident and charming.

"We only went out once," Jin reminded him, "and you left early anyway."

He remembered that evening very well, largely because he'd spent most of it watching Kame - ostensibly for problems, but really it was just an excuse to look at him a lot, to brand Kame's image into his memory. Hair tied up in a short ponytail, a few coppery strands tugged free by the wind on the way over. Eyes bright and laughing, meeting Jin's with a smile. Chopsticks darting quickly from plate to mouth, pausing every now and then to gesture, adding emphasis to Kame's speech.

It had all been going so well, right up until Kame had pushed his food away, declared that he wasn't feeling so good, and disappeared before Jin could offer him a lift home. His internal repair mechanisms usually took care of stomach upsets and the like, but only once he was at rest, and they didn't seem to be up to the challenge of handling the more outlandish problems.

"Yeah, my stomach was feeling weird," Kame said. "I didn't think there was any point staying in the restaurant."

"I'd have given you a ride home, you know. You didn't have to run off like that."

In response, Kame muttered something Jin couldn't quite catch, so he asked him to repeat it.

Kame's skin pigmentation settings had him blush a faint red when he was experiencing embarrassment. Not today, however. Jin wasn't sure why Kame was becoming suffused with purple in his cheeks and along his neck, but at least he knew it had nothing to do with the lack of oxygen - Kame's lungs had only been working sporadically since Jin had sat down.

"I said, you would've made me feel worse," Kame mumbled, just barely louder than before.

Jin glared at him. "Are you insulting my driving?"

The purple glow began to fade away. "No more than usual. But it's your fault I started feeling ill, so I thought I'd better avoid you for the rest of the night."

"How is it *my* fault?" Jin spluttered. "What did I do?"

"You kept staring at me!"

 _Oops._ "I didn't think you'd noticed."

"You spent so long looking at me that Koki and Nakamaru stole half the food from your plate and you were completely oblivious."

"Ah, so that's why they kept laughing at me!" Jin thought he'd left the restaurant feeling oddly hungry. "Sorry about the staring. I didn't mean to make you feel ill. I still don't see how it's my fault, though; I look at you all the time."

It was at this point that Jin realised he'd better shut up before he let his mouth run away with him completely.

"And I feel ill *all the time*," Kame said bitterly. "All the time I think about you, anyway."

Jin drooped, deflated. "I think I preferred it when you were insulting my driving. If I make you so sick, why'd you come over?"

"Because there's obviously something wrong with me and I want to figure out what it is! All those times that something weird happens, like the nails or strange patches of colour - they're all after I've been thinking about you."

Jin cast his mind back over Kame's earlier complaints. "You were thinking about me in the shower?"

"Just forget I said that."

Jin smirked. "No, I don't want to forget it. So really, this isn't my fault for looking at you, but your fault for thinking about me."

"Thinking about you makes me feel weird and my body start acting crazy - I wouldn't sound so flattered if I were you."

"Sounds like Kame-chan's in love," Jin said lightly, forgetting, for a moment, that he didn't even know if the cyborg was capable of feeling such an emotion.

Kame rolled his eyes. "Or I'm allergic to you, how about that?"

"I like my theory better." One of the things the manual had been very clear about was that Kame couldn't develop allergies, so Jin knew that couldn't be it. Besides, who could possibly be allergic to *him*? "Anyway," he continued bravely, "thinking about you makes me feel weird too."

"Indigestion?" Kame suggested.

Jin gave him a gentle swat on the arm. "You know what I'm talking about."

Kame pretended to look hurt and rubbed his arm. "Yeah, I think so," he said. "Maybe. Feeling like your heart's beating so fast it's about to burst out of your chest, or your intestines start to tie themselves up in knots because you're so nervous."

"Your breath catches in your throat when you meet, and your ears won't let you hear anyone else's voice," Jin finished for him, stomach churning in anxiety that Kame's physical problems might be purely mechanical in nature.

Kame gave him a sideways sort of smile. "If that's your definition of love, I'm surprised anyone survives it for long."

"I think it's supposed to get easier."

"How? If you ignore it?"

Jin shook his head vigorously: the longer Kame went on feeling like this, the worse his malfunctions were going to get and the greater the chance that they'd have to have him shut down, or at least sent off for major repairs. "If you act on it," he said firmly. "Then you stop worrying about whether or not the other person feels the same way you do."

And that, of course, could lead to a whole new set of worries, but he didn't care to elaborate. Best to keep things simple; it didn't take much to confuse Jin with such complicated issues.

Kame's smile looked a lot more confident now. "But I don't have anything to worry about, right? Or were you just speaking sympathetically?"

"I wasn't, but..."

Jin's voice faded away to nothing as Kame leaned across and brushed his bangs from his eyes, leaving Jin's face on full view in all its bewildered glory.

"You're cute when you're confused," Kame told him. His hand didn't move, resting lightly on Jin's hair, and Jin's puzzlement morphed into a kind of happy indignation.

"I'm older than you so don't call me 'cute'!"

"I'll call you whatever I want," Kame promised him with a wink.

They held still like that for several moments, watching each other's faces, waiting for some sort of signal. Stop? Go? Talk? Tease? Touch?

 _Kiss?_

Jin thought he'd moved, but maybe it had been Kame; it didn't matter which one of them started it. Kame's lips, though synthetic, felt as real as everything else about him. Warm, dry and pleasantly soft, moulding themselves to Jin's with a touch that was utterly unfamiliar and yet wholly comforting.

"Call me whatever you want," Jin breathed when they parted. "And wherever you want. Whenever, even."

Kame kissed him again, deeper, sliding his hand down to the base of Jin's neck to keep him in place. "How about 'mine', 'here' and 'now'?"

Jin fought for clarity through the euphoric haze, struggling to clear his head enough to question the wisdom of getting involved with a cyborg. Easier said than done when the aforementioned cyborg was sprinkling random butterfly kisses everywhere and slipping his free hand up under Jin's shirt.

Not for the first time, Jin wondered exactly why Kame had been commissioned in the first place. Had he been built to become some kind of super-idol, or as a pleasure toy - one who could be programmed not to press charges?

Whatever Kame's origins, his enthusiasm was real enough. Over the years, Jin had grown so used to thinking of him as completely human, as his friend and bandmate, that it wasn't, he discovered, so difficult to make the transition from friend to lover. After all, he had an unfair advantage. If things went horribly wrong, Kame had a reset button.

Jin only realised he'd lapsed into a brown study when Kame pecked him on the nose and said his name impatiently, waiting for a reply. He responded by shifting his weight on the couch so the arm was at his back, and pulled Kame half into his lap. It made sense to let the guy with the immunity to back problems take the awkward angles.

Kame went eagerly, pressing up so closely against him that Jin knew the manual wasn't lying about Kame's anatomy being "fully functional". How much opportunity Kame had had to use it, Jin didn't know.

"All right, or am I too heavy?" Kame asked in between fevered kisses.

Jin thought about how tiny Kame had been before they'd adjusted his food intake module, and considered teasing him about the weight - though mostly muscle - that he'd gained in the last couple of years. He didn't get the chance. Kame grasped the hem of Jin's T-shirt and slowly pulled it up, stopping midway to say a teasing hello to his nipples, and the next sound out of Jin's mouth was a slightly surprised moan.

Kame gave a little start, looking pleased. Discarding the shirt altogether and beginning with Jin's lips, he worked his way back down to replace his hands with his mouth, swirling his tongue round first one then the other while his hands encircled Jin's hips, feather-skimming beneath the waistband of his jeans. There was nothing strange about him now, no blights on the skin, no killer nails. When he lifted his head again to meet Jin's heavy-lidded gaze, exertion and pleasure had combined to bring a faint flush to his face - and this time, it wasn't purple.

At the sight of Kame's completely normal blush, Jin breathed a sigh of relief. If he wasn't going crazy thinking about Jin anymore, they wouldn't have to get him fixed, though Jin had no clue how he was going to explain the situation to the rest of the band. By text message, possibly.

In any case, encouraging Kame to act on his crush might have been the smartest thing he'd ever done, Jin decided - for both of them.

Unbuttoning Kame's shirt seemed to take forever, but it was worth the wait for Jin to be able to explore the smooth expanse of skin beneath, trailing his fingers every which way and delighting in the short, breathy sounds Kame was making in response. Oh yes, he'd been carefully constructed indeed, this beautiful young man, with his pleasure receptors in fine working order.

"I never thought I'd say this," Kame said, "but I think you were right. I don't feel ill at all."

"You are thinking about me, right?"

Kame laughed. "Don't look so anxious about it. Who else would I be thinking of at a time like this?"

"Just checking."

Kame pecked Jin on the nose again. "Isn't it a little soon for you to be jealous?"

"Why should I be jealous? I'm the one you started malfunctioning over."

Too late, Jin realised he'd said something very stupid and clapped a hand over his mouth. Luckily, Kame didn't interpret it as meant, and even found it amusing.

"You started malfunctioning too," he pointed out. "Something about heavy breathing..."

"No, that's what I'm doing now!"

Jin's breathing *was* laboured, but so was Kame's, which meant his lungs were working normally again. It was difficult for Jin to take a deep breath when Kame's hands were undoing his jeans, fingers brushing up against his bare stomach and making him shiver at the contact. He managed to push himself up just enough for Kame to drag the fabric down to pool underneath his thighs.

Kame caught his fingers and pressed them to his own belt buckle. "Your turn."

"I was getting there," Jin whined. He made quick work of the belt and the button beneath, dragging the zip down deliberately slowly till he could push the denim past Kame's narrow hips.

Kame smiled in satisfaction, looking like the cat who'd got not only the cream but the whole damn dairy, a mental image that gave Jin all sorts of inappropriate thoughts about milkmaid costumes. "Turn around."

"What?"

He nudged Jin gently to show him where he wanted him. "There's not enough room for my legs like this."

"Oh." Jin swivelled round again so he was sitting properly on the couch, and Kame straddled his legs from the front. "I thought you meant...uh..."

"Maybe later," Kame murmured in a voice so sultry it almost sent Jin into convulsions, partly from the thought of the possible pleasures involved - and partly, it must be said, from uneasiness. There was no telling what could happen if Kame went haywire, and Jin was reluctant to find out in such an intimate position. Explaining to his doctor, assuming he survived, would be only slightly less humiliating than explaining to Johnny why his artificial pretty boy had overheated.

Jin smiled awkwardly, and Kame recanted. "Or maybe not. We're having an outdoor photoshoot tomorrow and I think they want us to ride horses."

"Horses?" Jin groaned.

"I don't think they'll let me ride *you* for the pictures. Not in Potato," Kame teased.

On the word "ride" Kame ground his hips against Jin's, eliciting a gasp from him, and a delicious heat spread through Jin's body. It warmed him from his toes to his flushed face and sweat beaded at his temples. He thrust back - all that dance practice had to come in useful sometime - and met Kame in a rough, inelegant struggle that had nothing to do with humans and cyborgs and everything to do with being two young men who were wildly attracted to each other and determined to do something about it. It wasn't pretty, it wasn't neat, and it wasn't always painless. It was hot, messy and frantic, but it was real.

Jin's fingers clamped down on Kame's shoulders, forming deep indentations in the pale skin that would soon be fixed by the internal repair mechanisms. He threw back his head, panting heavily, as Kame suckled at his collarbone. That he was sensitive there was common knowledge; that he could be driven to mindless, incomprehensible ecstasy simply through having it treated so lavishly was a secret evidently known only to Kame.

Kame didn't seem to mind Jin's fingernails scoring his flesh, or perhaps he just didn't notice. His own hands were tangled in Jin's hair, gentle strokes alternating with hard, painful tugs where his fingers curled into fists.

They slipped and slid against each other, raw friction giving way to slick, damp heat between them. Time enough later for slow, soothing caresses, to be tender and considerate and explore with gentle, cautious motions.

Kame extricated his hands from Jin's curls, trying to be careful but not completely succeeding, and threw his arms round Jin's neck, abandoning his collarbone to return to his lips. Jin didn't even manage to voice a protest before Kame's tongue was inviting his to join it in a dance, pressing inside in an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome manoeuvre.

It was, Jin thought dazedly, what he'd just vowed to avoid, letting Kame inside with his synthetic flesh and the artificial blood that flowed beneath it. But Kame's saliva was just like his own and his sweat soaked into Jin's couch with no telltale stain to betray his origins: how else might their bodies be the same?

Kame wasn't capable of impregnating anyone, Jin knew, but to avoid arousing suspicion, he had to be capable of producing *something* - though why anyone would want to build an artificial semen generator, he had no idea. It did add that touch of realism, however, when Kame suddenly clawed his fingers into Jin's back and cried out, spilling all over both of them.

Jin cried out too, mostly in pain - one of Kame's nails had broken sometime in the process and the jagged edge sliced into him, since broken nails weren't auto-repaired and the default setting for regrowth was slow. "I'm all sticky," he complained.

"Not nearly as sticky as you will be in a minute," Kame promised, breathing hard, and set to work finishing Jin off with his hands. It didn't take long; Jin was right on the very brink, shaking from the effort of holding himself back. He sank into the cushions afterwards, Kame still settled on his lap, and tried to get his breathing back under control.

"Thank you," Kame said unexpectedly.

"For what?"

"For being your usual, obvious self and helping me figure out what was wrong with me. I mean, I still don't understand how they were physically possible, but at least if I was hallucinating the whole time I now have a reason why."

Jin nodded in what he hoped was a sage fashion. "Yep, hallucinating. Definitely. Nobody's nails grow that fast." He shifted uncomfortably in his now-wet jeans. "I really need a shower."

"So take one. I'm not going anywhere."

"Join me?" Jin offered, but Kame smiled and rolled to the side so Jin could stand up.

"Maybe when I can get my legs to work. You go first, I'm just going to sit here and read a magazine or something for a bit."

It wasn't until Jin was luxuriating under the spray, hot water leaving him clean and pure again, that he remembered he'd hidden some of the manual pages in his magazine stack...


End file.
